The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  But Andrea Stern appeared to be her usual neutral self. All she wanted to know was how I felt about terminating things with Michael. “Awful, if you want to know the truth,” I said. “The sex was fantastic, like a poultice over all the places that hurt. You know, the perfect panacea for midlife angst. But when I let myself think ahead more than a day at a time, I became terrified, so I walked away while I could still walk. I mean, I knew we were never destined to go off into the sunset together.” I sounded as if I were trying to convince myself, too, and I couldn’t seem to shut up. “Probably because I’m a lot closer to the sunset than he is.”

  “It will get better,” Dr. Stern said.

  I was startled; that was the most direct, unsolicited statement she’d ever offered me. “Promise?” I asked.

  She only smiled. “What about the manuscript?”

  “The real business between us? That’s still going forward. And maybe we’ll have more time for it now.” That last came out more wistfully than I’d intended.

  Dr. Stern was interested in how Michael had masked his personal tragedy in fiction, and in my ability to figure it out. It boded well, she said, for an interpretation of my own psychological mystery.

  “I went to see my father last week,” I said, “speaking of mysteries.” I recounted the highlights, or low moments, of my visit to the nursing home, the way I’d harassed my poor father about the past, to no avail. I could have throttled him when I was there, as if he were willfully withholding information, but he became an object of pity in retrospect. “I wish my children would ask me everything they need to know right now, before I lose it, too,” I said. “Favorite recipes, where the family jewels are, all the big secrets.”

  “You see your father as the repository of family secrets?”

  “Yes, locked and sealed forever. And he’s swallowed the key.”

  “There may be other keys, other ways in,” Dr. Stern suggested.

  “You mean me?” I said. “But I only have little snippets of early memory. And I’m not sure I didn’t make some of it up. I used to write fiction, remember.”

  “Michael does, too,” she said. “It’s one way of processing the truth.”

  “So what do I do? Write the story of my life? Or maybe I ought to try free association—the Violet Steinhorn method of recovered memory.” I was being sardonic, of course, but as I sat there, under Dr. Stern’s steady, gently inquiring gaze, it began to seem like a reasonable idea. So I leaned back into the wings of the chair, shutting my eyes, and began.

  It became a habit, something I could do at will almost anywhere and anytime, without anyone’s awareness, the way I used to do the Kegel exercises for weeks after giving birth. On the checkout line at the supermarket, browsing in a bookstore, even talking on the telephone. I’d had a secret life under my skirt, and now there was one inside my head. The exercises gradually tightened my pelvic muscles, and, if nothing else, this new process let me know what was on my mind, which moved in a frantic zigzag, like a fly trapped between the panes of a window. Not all that free, really, and I wasn’t ever sure if I was trying to get in or out.

  I thought about Ev of Ev and Al, and about Ev alone. Then, unexpectedly, of Ev with someone else. But I skittered away from that idea before it could turn into an image. The children were seen in riffled snapshots at all ages, an impatient glance through a family album. My mother, young and then dead, as if she’d barely lived at all—the life span of a fly? Geese flying in a vee over Central Park. The vee of my own crotch and Michael or Ev thrashing into me. And there were flashes, bulletins from childhood: bossy Violet as Donna Parker, as the Headless Horseman, Faye coming up the basement stairs, my father in his leather chair, with Beethoven pouring over everything, like honey in which to trap a fly.

  One day I went to see where Ev was living. He wouldn’t be there, I was certain of that, because Scotty had told me they were meeting at Ev’s office at noon before going out to lunch. This news made me feel both pleased and envious—they had formed an alliance behind my back—but at least it gave me the opportunity to investigate Ev’s new life without his knowledge. I took the subway to 42nd Street and then walked a few blocks south and west until I came to the address on the blue Post-it he had left on my computer.

  The building was one of those generic postwar places. Ugly yellowish brick, a revolving door. A dentist and a podiatrist shared the office space on the street level—they might have advertised head-to-toe care. I looked up, counting the uniformly blank windows; Ev’s sublet was on the tenth floor, apartment 10B, but I didn’t even know which way it faced. I could see a doorman sitting at a desk in the lobby, reading a newspaper. I imagined walking right past him as if I belonged there, and taking an elevator up to the tenth floor. But then what?

  There were two hired cars double-parked in front, their black-suited drivers slouched against the hoods, smoking. Fast-food and video rental places were conveniently situated across the street, and the neon SAME DAY SERVICE sign of a dry cleaner/laundry blinked beguilingly only a few doors down. It didn’t feel like a neighborhood, although people obviously lived there. The revolving doors flashed in the sunlight. Two men with attaché cases went in. A woman in a leather mini skirt and big sunglasses came out and got into one of the hired cars. I felt like the spy that I was and, unaccountably, like a traitor.

  “Need a ride?” someone said. I was so startled, you would’ve thought there was a gun at my back. But it was only the driver of the other double-parked car. Between fares, probably, or stood up by one of them.

  As soon as my heart slowed, I realized that a ride was exactly what I needed, that I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. “Yes, I do,” I said. “How much to Mount Sinai Hospital?” I truly hadn’t planned to say that; I guess that’s what happens when you leave yourself open to free association.

  My father’s offices had been on the twelfth floor of the old Klingenstein Building. My mother and I used to go in through the entrance on Madison Avenue, near 100th Street. The scene had changed, like everything else. I remembered a hot dog stand and someone selling Italian ices in the summer, but vendors lined the street now, offering everything from socks and watches to knockoffs of Gucci handbags.

  Nuclear medicine took up the entire twelfth floor of Klingenstein. I was reminded of those dreams one has about places that are familiar, yet vitally changed: the school with an elusive homeroom, the house with a sudden, unexplored wing. The whole place must have been gutted and reconstructed, so I couldn’t even locate my father’s former space. It had been fairly close to the elevators—you made a left turn when you got off, and then veered right (my feet automatically followed an old path)—but I wasn’t sure if the elevators were still in the same place.

  A doctor in a red turban went by, and a young man on crutches. I wandered around, peering into offices where strangers sat at computers and the sick waited to have their fortunes told, the way they always have. There was no one anywhere resembling Miss Snow or Parksie, though, and no gilt plaque announcing the inner sanctum of Samuel Brill, MD. Whatever I had hoped to discover, or recover from the past, wasn’t evident, and going there seemed like nothing more than a naïve and futile impulse. Yet I roamed the corridors awhile longer, hunched over and with one hand held against that distressed place in my chest; it’s a wonder no one asked if I was looking for cardiology.

  I walked all the way home afterward, and found that my knack for leapfrogging thoughts was impaired. All I could think about, obsessively and with a keening sadness, was Ev in his new quarters, feeling restless and displaced. It was easy enough to imagine the furnishings, as undistinguished and anonymous as the building. The standard bed, sofa, end tables, and easy chair you’d find in any mid-priced hotel suite. Wall-to-wall carpeting in some neutral, desert tone; plants that don’t require that much water or light. Everything without particular character or charm, except for the handful of artifacts Ev had taken from home: his blue Clichy, the yellow catch-all bowl from the kitchen
counter, some photographs of the kids.

  Our apartment, on the other hand, had retained most of its idiosyncratic familial appeal, like a museum dedicated to our former lives. As I opened the door and stepped inside, I remembered the time Ev and I took the children to Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s old summer residence on Long Island, and how those roped-off rooms still contained the furniture, the bedclothes, the rugs, the abandoned toys of that long-dead family. We visited the graves afterward, in case their tenants’ absence from those rooms wasn’t proof enough. Even the family dogs were buried there, which made Scotty cry. This was a melodramatically morbid comparison, I knew. Everyone who’d inhabited our rooms was alive and well, even if most of us lived somewhere else now. The place was spooky with domestic history, though, and ominously quiet.

  When the phone rang, I dropped my purse on the bed before I answered it, and when I heard Ev’s voice in my ear, I sat down beside the purse. My first, illogical thought was that he knew somehow about my spying mission, that he was calling to accuse or berate me. But it was only a friendly call; we were civilized beings, just as I’d told Violet, and there was ongoing family business between us. He told me that he’d had lunch with Scott, and that they’d had a pretty good time. “Scotty seems to have his head together,” he said, which amounted to a rare paternal tribute from Ev.

  “So, are you going to take him into the family business?” I asked. I was just trying to be funny, I suppose, to go along with what seemed like his own good humor.

  But I encountered what I can only call a shocked silence. “I would never do that to him,” Ev said finally. His voice had become cool and flat.

  For the first time in a long while, I really contemplated his daily working life. I pictured him knotting his tie in the morning, stuffing his briefcase with papers, putting coins and keys and antacid tablets into his pockets. He’d taken the subway downtown most days, a claustrophobic, bone-rattling rush-hour ride. He would travel on a different line now, and for a shorter trip, but it would be a similar hustle to get to his office. And I saw the office itself, his desk covered with paper and font samples, and the bulletin board behind it a collage of annual reports, flyers, and bar mitzvah invitations.

  The cousins Ev had grown up with, Barry and Lloyd, were stationed in identical cubicles across from his, two balding guys who shot rubber bands at their pretty Latina employees and talked loudly and incessantly on the telephone, making deals, haggling over prices. The printing business had undergone radical changes with the advent, the onslaught, of the computer. The founding uncles’ noisy old presses were long gone, like the uncles themselves; it was all desktop work for their successors, and very competitive. They had to keep reinventing the operation, making it ever more high-tech and cost-effective, and Ev’s vocabulary, which had once favored phrases like moral imperative and narrative flow, was infused now with references to thermography and digital output.

  As if it were a natural segue of thoughts, I remembered our first apartment together, in Iowa—on the top floor of a Victorian frame house divided into student rentals—with its whining bedsprings and the determined clacking of our twin typewriters. I felt a charge of regret and longing, like the last surge of electrical power right before an outage. “I know that,” I said, limply and too late. “I was just kidding. And, anyway, it’s not as if you’re Tony Soprano.” Alice, think before you speak! When he didn’t respond, I kept right on going. “I hear that you’ve volunteered to print the catalogs for Violet’s group. That’s really great—will they be in color?”

  “I don’t know,” Ev said, still without affect.

  I sighed. How long was he going to keep this up? I’d told him that I hadn’t meant what I’d said, which was tantamount to an apology. And what right did he have to be so damned sensitive? Just like me, he knew that everyone is disillusioned in the end, especially the most ambitious among us. You just have to make the most of what happens, without taking it out on the people around you. “I have to go, Ev,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty busy here,” he answered, as if it had been his own idea to hang up.

  A couple of days later I took Scott to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants in his neighborhood. Over the appetizers, he told me that he was thinking of going back to school, that he and Ev had discussed it during their lunch date. He was going to look into a film program at the New School for the spring semester.

  “What will you do with that?” I asked, although it was in keeping with the sort of schemes I used to dream up for him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, video editing maybe, or animation. Dad says they’re, like, pretty hot fields.”

  “Uh-huh. And will you give up your job at Tower?” I asked, as if I were scandalized about his sacrificing such a plum.

  “Yeah, probably,” Scott said. “Dad says he’d bankroll me at first, and then maybe I could get a student loan or something.”

  Dad says, Dad says—that was a brand-new mantra. I bit into a samosa and burned my tongue. As I downed some ice water, it occurred to me that Ev must have been giving Scotty some recent handouts or loans. That was why he hadn’t asked me for any money for a while. When the two of them had been at such inflexible odds with each other, I’d hoped and argued for just this kind of sympathetic connection between them. But now I felt usurped by it. Ev had called forth his soft, impractical alter ego, Al, to mother our prodigal son. And the residual Ev in me bristled with resentment. “Do you know anything about film?” I demanded. “Do you even go to the movies?” I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if my voice deepened into a baritone, if dark hair sprang up on the backs of my hands. Scott leaned away from me, clutching his fork. “Oh, Scotty,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “It’s okay, Ma,” he croaked, still eyeing me warily. Mercifully, our main courses arrived then, in a theatrical production of sizzle and smoke, breaking the awful tension.

  The next time I saw Dr. Stern, I found myself paraphrasing Celia. “All relationships are such stupid power struggles,” I said. “Why does one of us always have to be on top, in bed and in the world? Why can’t we ever just lie there peacefully, side by side? I mean, before we’re dead.”

  22

  Ruth Casey had submitted her manuscript, Perfection, to a few publishers before she’d sent it on to me, and she’d gotten it back quickly from all of them, and without comment. I suspected it had only been read by some very young editorial assistants who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, imagine the grim realities of autism she’d depicted. Or maybe it had just been buried in the slush pile and not read at all. I was going to refer her to an agent I knew who would probably put her in touch with a mature and sympathetic editor, but on a second read, I saw ways of making the manuscript better first, and more competitive in a crowded market.

  The writing was very good, but she’d only done occasional short magazine pieces before, and she needed help with organizing her material and the general structure of the book. And I wondered if the narrative would be more appealing if the voice were a little warmer and less detached. But its main content, about the daily struggles of a couple with a wild yet unresponsive child, and the gradual loss of hope, was both arresting and appalling. Even the latest scientific findings, Ruth wrote, which took the onus off the parents of autistic children, with new suspects like epilepsy and a fragile X syndrome, couldn’t relieve her and her husband of their sense of liability. “I didn’t need Bettelheim to nail me,” she wrote. “I gladly did it to myself. David took an even bigger hit.” Despite the cool, tough tone of her prose, I expected Ruth herself to appear war-torn, starved for sensible company and a compassionate ear.

  In person, though, she was merely an impassive and pallid dishwater blonde in her early forties. When I held out my hand, she took it, but hers was icy and limp and I quickly let go. In describing her to Violet later, I used the word reserved, but I actually thought she was a pretty cold fish. Maybe her disaffection enabled
her to deal with her sad and strenuously difficult life; it also made her the ideal antidote to Michael for me. This was going to be a professional arrangement, pure and simple. No one would have to take off her clothes to get any work done.

  I took on Perfection, and also an informed, but overwrought, novel of the Renaissance, glad to be kept busy and sidetracked from my personal problems. When I checked my e-mail one morning for new responses to my ad, there was a message from Thomas Roman. I realized that I hadn’t thought about him much in the turmoil of the past few weeks. He wrote that he was coming to New York City soon for a few days, and wondered if we could meet for a drink or tea somewhere; he had something to give me. If that turned out to be a collection of my mother’s love letters, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see them.

  So much had transpired since I’d started looking into her past. I remembered the tortured scrawl of my father’s letter to “Darling,” and I thought of his confusion when he accused me of bringing my “paramour” to the nursing home, and of my actual betrayal of Ev. It wasn’t easy to trust love or any of its artifacts. And my desire to know everything was tempered by a need to protect certain aspects of memory and history. But maybe Thomas Roman had a poem of hers I’d never seen before, or only an innocent letter containing some of those early anecdotal details unavailable anywhere else. I wrote back, setting a time and place for us to meet.

  That afternoon Michael and I met at a coffee shop to go over my notes on his recent revisions. We’d exchanged a few wary e-mails, but hadn’t seen each other since the end of our affair. He was sitting in a booth when I got there, scribbling in a notebook.

  “Hey,” he said, jumping up and dropping his pen, but the kiss that landed near my chin was chaste and friendly. Dr. Stern was right; it was already a little better. As soon as we were settled in the booth, with the table between us, we ordered coffee and got right down to business.